The half-forgotten subscription model deserves our praise and renewed attention. In the Digital Age, it has become more popular than ever.

Robin Good's insight:

An excellent in-depth article by Kent Anderson analysing the key advantages and benefits of the subscription business model for news and content publishers of all kinds.

Key advantages of subscription model according to author:

Integrity of relationship publisher - subscriber

Greater privacy for subscribers

Drives and rewards innovation

The article cites and points to many relevant examples and companies which utilize a subscription model and are successful at it.

"The subscription model is allowing music publishers to compete with iTunes. It is allowing Amazon and Target to compete with grocery stores. It is allowing the Washington Post to reimagine itself. It is allowing editors to make a living selecting the best from the rest. It is your cell phone, your wearable, your streaming service.

Trendwatching.com, a web magazine devoted to analyze, research and report about upcoming consumer trends, has released the Consumer Trend Canvas (inspired by Alex Osterwalder's).

The free CTC has been designed for anyone interested in looking deeper into the innovation and business opportunities available by looking into the specific traits of new consumer trends.

The Consumer Trend Canvas per se is nothing else but a printable PDF framework that contains instructions, tips and examples as well as a full-page structured canvas that help you analyze any possible consumer trend.

"An easy-to-follow framework that will help you not only unpack and understand any consumer trend, but also help you apply it to launch successful consumer-facing innovations of your own."

An easy-to-follow framework that will help you not only unpack andunderstand any consumer trend, but also help you apply it to launchsuccessful consumer-facing innovations of your own.

How & when to use the CONSUMER TREND CANVAS:Download your blank Consumer Trend CanvasTake the trend that you are interested in exploring further (either from us, or elsewhere!).As you analyze the trend, fill out the left hand side of the canvas (‘Understand’) with insights, data and examples. Then use the ‘Apply’ section on the right hand side to capture your ideas.Keep on circling back to re-examine how the segments relate to each other. Insights in one segment may highlight other elements of the trend and help you uncover truly novel concepts.Also, try using it to structure an innovation session with your team or a client. Then enjoy that ‘a-ha!’ moment as people both understand what a trend is all about, and how to make the most of it ;)

A significant percentage of working-age Mexicans (PEA: economically active population) have no chance of finding a job as an employee, so it needs to develop the ability to use tools for self-employed or start a business. A useful tool is the Business Model Canvas, which allows a review sheet nine key concepts that has any business, and develop knowledge and actions that increase the likelihood that the company move forward.

Which leads to the question: What are online readers willing to pay for digital content?

It's one of those complex issues troubling publishers, editors and reporters who have to worry about producing enticing content to compete with the plethora of digital fare, and, ensure the success of their revenue streams.

Paid Digital Content: The Journey Begins, a report by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA), uses case studies to explain successes, failures and transitions news organizations are experiencing in attempts to get readers to pay for what they consume.

Thanks to Marty Zwilling on StartupProfessionals for distilling some of the key traits that have made Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google such uniquely successful companies.

From the article intro: "According to many technology pundits, including Phil Simon, in his book “The Age of the Platform,” these four exemplify the rise of platforms with applications as a business model, rather than a single product or service. Whether you believe his conclusion or not, you can learn a lot from the lessons he offers on how to build a competitive business model today."

The article provides ten key principles utilized by this "gang of four" to reach their broad business success.

Here my favorite four:

1) Act small. “Bigness” and all of its attendant problems – bureaucracy, politics, infighting, and the like – put any business model at risk. Bureaucracy and excessive democracy kill speed. Shake organizations up often to avoid stiff and inflexible management structures.

2) Be open and collaborative. Startups as well as large companies must be open to all sorts of new ventures, partnerships, and offerings. Make application programming interfaces (APIs) open and freely available to developers, partners, and consumers.

3) Move quickly and decisively when spotting a niche. Don’t confuse patience with inertia. Waiting too long means that an opportunity may disappear permanently – or someone else may beat you to the punch. Temper expectations, but make the bet.

4) Use existing tools. It’s time consuming, expensive, and simply unnecessary for every company to create its own tools and base functions (planks) from scratch. By using outposts, businesses increase serendipity, exposure, and cross-pollination.

This great blog post captured by curator Robin Good talks about platforms and the gang of four (Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook).

"Today’s dizzying pace of change shows no signs of abating. If anything, it is likely to accelerate. So do everything you can to heed these lessons today, to be as prepared as possible for a vastly different tomorrow."

The ten lessons identified remind me also of the work of Rita McGrath (End of Competitive Advantage) who talks about six key areas in what she calls "The New Strategy Playbook":

Robin Good: Interesting short article at GigaOM by Rag Srinivasan, highlighting the not too well known story of how "freemium" came about thanks to a number of tests that were run by MIT behavioral economists.

The article questions the freemium model strategy which hopes to extract a sufficient number of paying customers from a much larger free user base.

"Freemium can only offer the hope that customers will fall in love with your product and be willing to pay for it later. This is a scattershot approach to monetization."

And I agree. But freemium can be still an effective business model as long as you do take into serious considerations the key questions posed in this article before centering your future marketing strategy on it.

Robin Good: If you are looking for a good introductory guide to the use of crowds for the generation of revenue and the extended monetization of existing line of products/services, I definitely recommend giving a good look to this guide prepared by Ross Dawson and Steve Bynghall.

In the guide you can find out why crowdsourced business models are so promising and why they are being adopted rapidly by the major brands around the world.

Robin Good: Matthew Ingram has just published a great article on GigaOM about the news media industry and the increasing realization that the content it produces is more often than not found, discovered, shared and read somewhere else from that content originated.

He writes: "...one other thing that becomes clear from the Pew report is just how big a role aggregators of all kinds — both human and machine-powered — are playing in news consumption.

Despite the growing evidence to the contrary, many newspaper companies and other traditional media outlets still seem to think the vast majority of their audience comes to them directly and prefers to read their content above all other sources.

More than anything else, this is the core philosophy behind the rise of paywalls — which more and more papers are implementing — and also the millions of dollars that media companies have poured into developing iPad apps and other walled-garden-style approaches to news delivery. The assumption is that readers will want only the content that comes from that specific outlet."

But this is not anymore the case.

"What does all of this mean for media companies?

More than anything, it means that trying to recreate the scarcity of content that used to exist in print — when media outlets controlled not only the creation of news but the platforms through which it was distributed — by using paywalls and subscription apps is fundamentally a losing battle.

...One response to that is to shrink your audience down to those who will pay, as some outlets like the Financial Times have done and several of Rupert Murdoch’s British papers are trying to do.

The other approach is to be as open and distributed as possible, to try to take advantage of the democracy of distribution instead of fighting it, and then to find other ways to monetize that audience and their attention, whether it’s e-books or live events or the “reverse paywall” model Jeff Jarvis and others have proposed.

Either way, aggregation and curation are the new reality of media, whether media companies like it or not."

"In the old, narrow view of capitalism, business contributes to society by making a profit, which supports employment, wages, purchases, investments, and taxes.

Conducting business as usual is sufficient social benefit. A firm is largely a self-contained entity, and social or community issues fall outside its proper scope.

...

[But] in recent years business increasingly has been viewed as a major cause of social, environmental, and economic problems.

Companies are widely perceived to be prospering at the expense of the broader community.

Even worse, the more business has begun to embrace corporate responsibility, the more it has been blamed for society’s failures. The legitimacy of business has fallen to levels not seen in recent history.

This diminished trust in business leads political leaders to set policies that undermine competitiveness and sap economic growth. Business is caught in a vicious circle.

A big part of the problem lies with companies themselves, which remain trapped in an outdated approach to value creation that has emerged over the past few decades.

They continue to view value creation narrowly, optimizing short-term financial performance in a bubble while missing the most important customer needs and ignoring the broader influences that determine their longer-term success.

...

The solution lies in the principle of shared value, which involves creating economic value in a way that also creates value for society by addressing its needs and challenges.

Businesses must reconnect company success with social progress.

Shared value is not social responsibility, philanthropy, or even sustainability, but a new way to achieve economic success.

The purpose of this post is simple: to teach you how to get a $1,000,000 business idea off the ground in one weekend, full of specific tools and tricks that Noah has used himself.

He will be your guide…"

....

"I’m going to suggest is that you start with a much simpler essence of your product over the course of a weekend, rather than wasting time building something for weeks… only to discover no one wants it."

Vincenzo Marino does an excellent reporting job on the International Journalism Festival news site, by summarising and distilling the good stuff emerging from an interesting and sustained debate on Twitter (Business Models for Journalism - Storify) on the state of online journalism and its potential future business models, initially kicked off by entrepreneur and Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen.

Great find by Robin Good and timely as we just had a session with Rita McGrath (author of the End of Competitive Advantage) emphasizing the impact of disruption and the need for a different mindset around resilience. This preso by Jeremiah Owyang gives some great tips for thinking about the types of shifts in business models we should be thinking about.

5. People make and share - collaboration and co-creation with your customers

6. Empowered people

This is important for CPAs to understand as they advise and support their businesses (clients and employers). Business models are no longer stagnant or as Rita would say, sustainable over a long-term. Thus we need to be constantly re-examiming our competitive advantages.

The Business Model Gallery is a growing database of curated business models canvases gathered from a diverse set of companies operating in different sectors.

For each company you can analyze its updated "business canvas" in which you can see at a glance the key value propositions, its partners, revenue streams and all of the other key business building blocks.

Business models can be easily searched, filtered and compared across specific building blocks you are interested in.

Coming up are also a PDF and PowerPoint export option as well as a dedicated iPad app.

A free trial is available and pro plans start at $9/month and go up all the way to $29/mo according to the number of features you want to use.

My comment: The Business Model Gallery offers a truly excellent gallery of valuable business models which can be extremely useful for anyone studying, researching or working on creating a successful new company.

Furthermore this is a great living example of how, curated collections of best of breed examples, are going to have a go as very useful business services in the coming months and years.

I've been using business model tool for years now. This gallery is truly amazing and I believe will be very useful for business architects and managers as they define their own corporate strategy because they will be able to easily compare with what others are doing.

Andrew Chen asks why we are so bad at predicting successful startups. He writes: "...we’re all so bad at predicting what will work and what won’t. I’ve written about my embarrassing skepticism about Facebook, but hey, I’m just a random tech guy.

For the folks whose job it is to professionally pick winners, the venture capitalists, they aren’t doing very well either.

It’s been widely noted that the venture capital asset class, after fees, has lagged the public markets- you’d be better off buying some index funds."

In his view, much of the disappointing results are due to the "generic startup advice" being offered online. He writes that generic principles cannot be effectively applied to all situations. And he is right.

But more than anything Andrew stops at analyzing what are the kind of people who often provide such predictions and strategic advice:

"[There are] two categories: hedgehogs, who view the world through the lens of a single defining idea and foxes who draw on a wide variety of experiences and for whom the world cannot be boiled down to a single idea."

"...Silver clearly identifies as a fox, and contrasted his approach to the talking head pundits that dominate political talk shows on TV and radio. For the pundits, the more aggressive, contrarian, and certain they seem, the more attention-grabbing they are.

Rather similar to what we see in the blogosphere, where people are rewarded for writing headlines like “10 reasons why [hot company] will be killed by [new product].” Or “Every startup should care about [metric X]” or whatever."

"The solution to all of this isn’t easy- to be a fox means to draw from a much broader set of data, to look at the problem from multiple perspectives, and to reach a conclusion that combines all of those datapoints."

"Over my 5 years in Silicon Valley, the biggest lesson I’ve learned from trying to predict startups is calibration. They talk about it in the video above, but the short way to describe it is to be careful with what you think you know versus what you don’t."

Robin Good: Here is a good article illustrating the several different alternatives available to any web designer to extend his revenue channels.

The creation and sale of design templates, icons collections, ebooks, advertising as well as the development of dedicated tools, software and plugins can be just some of the many extra revenue-making options available.

From the original article: "To summarize, the main lesson I’ve learned over the last couple of years is to have a long-term view and invest in yourself, not chase a quick buck.

The plan is rather simple, then: build a network, cultivate a strong identity to ensure the network knows who you are, and then come up with a product you can market to it."

Robin Good: As the author of The Startup Owner's Manual, Steve Blank is someone who has been experimenting, studying and analyzing startups for many years and who has a comprehensive vision of what it takes to be a successful startup and wher emost new digital companies fail.

In his own words a "startup" is "a temporary organization designed to search for a repetable and scalable business model".

In this excellent video interview by GigaOM Chris Albert, the focus is on the state of startups and entrepreneurship.

From the original article: "When Steve Blank talks about entrepreneurship, people listen.

...Blank co-founded the CRM software company E.piphany and the video game business Rocket Science.

His current gigs as an entrepreneurship professor at Stanford, UC Berkeley and Columbia give him a unique insight that combines a historical perspective with a look at the next generation of entrepreneurs.

Key takeaways:

1) Startups are not smaller versions of big companies, so don’t try to be like them

2) Startups are about searching for a business model, not executing a business plan

3) Contrary to the myth, Steve Jobs interacted with consumers more than you think

Robin Good: If you have been wondering how can it ever be that by giving things out for free people will buy more of your products/services, you must check out this great report on consumer adoption of freemium products and services.

“If it can’t ‘sell’ for free, can it ever sell at all?”

From MarketingPilgrim review of the report by Cynthia Boris: "The free sample has been used to tempt grocery shoppers since the invention of the toothpick, yet many of today’s marketers are reluctant to give anything away.

Apps, ebooks, access — you gotta give a little and if you do, you’ll get a lot.

iYogi just released a new study and infographic all about the power of the Freemium model.

Their results show that 100% of the people they surveyed have tried a Freemium product and 42% have gone on to pay for it."

"Making movies is expensive and risky. I totally get that the studios need to make a lot of money on those movies to make their business model work.

But denying customers the films they want, on the devices they want to watch them, when they want to watch them is not a great business model.

It leads to piracy, as we have discussed here many times, but more importantly it also leads to the loss of a transaction to a competing form of entertainment.

...I am sure there was a time when scarcity was a good business model for the film industry.

...I understand their muscle memory in terms of the scarcity business model.

But restricting access to content is a bad business model in the age of a global network that costs practically nothing to distribute on.

I've argued this point many times with film executives. They insist that they need their windows. They argue they need to manage access to their films to extract every last dollar from the market.

That just doesn't make sense to me.

If they went direct to their customers, offered their films at a reasonable price (say $5/view net to them), and if they made their films available day one everywhere in the world, I can't see how they wouldn't make more money."

Jeff Jarvis wites: "Imagine that you pay to get access to The Times. Everyone does.

You pay for one article.

Or you pay $20 as a deposit so you’re not bothered every time you come.

But whenever you add value to The Times, you earn a credit that delays the next bill.* You see ads, you get credit.* You click: more credit.* You come back often and read many pages: credit.* You promote The Times on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, or your blog: credit. The more folks share what you’ve shared, the more credit you get.* You buy merchandise via Times e-commerce: credit.* You buy tickets to a Times event: credit.* You hand over data that makes you more valuable to The Times and its advertisers (e.g., revealing where you’re going on your next trip): credit.* You add pithy comment to articles that other readers appreciate: credit.* You take on tasks in crowdsourced journalistic endeavors: credit.* You answer a reporter’s question on Twitter and the reporter uses your information: credit.* You correct an error in a story: credit.* You give a news tip or an idea for an article The Times publishes: credit.

Maybe you never pay for The Times again because The Times has gained more value out of its relationship with you.

If, on the other hand, you hardly do any of those things, then you have to pay for using The Times."

...

"You see, that values the local reader over the remote reader.

My idea for the reverse meter values the engaged reader over the occasional reader — and even rewards greater engagement.

And therein lies, I think, the key strategic skill for news businesses online: understanding that all readers are not equal; knowing who your more valuable readers are; getting more of them; and making them more valuable."

...

"The key strategic opportunity for news sites is relationships — deeper, more valuable relationships with more (but not too many) people."

From the article: "We create economic value out of information when we figure out an effective strategy that includes aggregating, filtering and connecting."

"Filtering is what helps us deal with the vast amount of information available to us."

"...the real question is, how do we design filters that let us find our way through this particular abundance of information?

And, you know, my answer to that question has been: the only group that can catalog everything is everybody." (Clay Shirky)

We try to filter information so that we end up with something that is relevant to us – it helps us learn something, it helps us solve a problem, it helps us develop a new hypothesis about the world around us.

These are all connections – and this is what really drives value creation.

However, we can’t connect without some filtering going on. So filtering is important, and it’s a term that includes several different sub-types. I can think of at least five forms of filtering.

...we can use these ideas about filtering to help with business model innovation by changing where it takes place in the value network.

One of Shirky’s points is that since Gutenberg, the economic logic of publishing required publishers (of books, music, movies) to act as filters in order to maximise their investment.

As publishing and filtering has shifted out to human networks, publishers no longer need to fill this role.

Someone (or some network) needs to, and since that creates value, it’s something that can perhaps be monetised.

You can see this in investing. You can put money in Berkshire-Hathaway, where investment choices are run through the personal expert filter of Warren Buffett. Or you can invest in individual stocks recommended by a broker- which is filtering through an expert network. Or you can take advantage of DIY investing, where you do your own filtering, probably aided by some heuristic filters as well. Three different investing business models based on three different filtering methods."

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.